The Orpheus Trail (4 page)

Circa 550
BC

Then the Lord Cyrus, lord of lords, king of the Persians, Medes, and all Ionia after he had defeated Croesus, king of Lydia with all its wealth and splendour, determined to conquer Assyria. To this end he sent magi as his servants and the servants of Ahura Mazda, Lord of Lords, God of Gods, into the land to prepare the people, among whom were dwelling many enslaved by the Assyrians, such as the people of Jerusalem whom King Nebuchadnazzar brought into captivity. The Assyrian capital was then the great city of Babylon whose walls have a circuit of fifty-six miles with a hundred gates of bronze. In the middle of the city are the royal palace and the temple of Bel, the Babylonian Zeus, where there is a golden statue of the god, seated on a golden throne with a table of gold beside.

When the Lord Cyrus came to the city he diverted the river Euphrates into the lake which Queen Nicrotis had dug as part of the city’s defences, and entered the city of Babylon along the riverbed as soon as the water was low enough. Then all the Babylonian empire as far as Egypt fell to the Persians and the captive peoples returned to their own lands.

‘Thus says the Lord, your ransomer who fashioned you from birth: I am the Lord who made all things, by myself I stretched out the skies, alone I hammered out the floor of the earth. I say of Jerusalem, “She shall be inhabited once more,” and of the cities of Judah, “they shall be rebuilt; and all their ruins I will restore.” I say to Cyrus, “You shall be my shepherd to carry out all my purpose, so that Jerusalem may be rebuilt and the foundations of the temple may be laid.” Thus says the Lord to Cyrus his anointed, Cyrus whom he has taken by the hand to subdue nations before him, I will go before you, I will break down gates of bronze, I will give you treasures from dark vaults, that you may know I am the Lord, Israel’s God who calls you by name. For the sake of Jacob my servant and Israel my chosen I have called you by name, and given you your title, though you have not known me. I make the light, I create the darkness, author alike of prosperity and trouble. “I alone have roused this man in righteousness and I will smooth his path before him; he shall rebuild my city and let my exiles go free.”’

The Unknown Isaiah

All hell broke loose as I’d feared. The chairman insisted on calling a press conference as soon as I told him what we’d found when, as I put it, we were making a routine inspection of the buckle to see why it was leaking dust, which was nearly the truth. Hilary phoned to say her boss had suggested calling in Professor Linden to help with
identifying
the objects and she had warned Linden to expect a summons.

‘Tell me more about him. How does he come to be a specialist in this sort of thing?’

‘Apparently he spent years in the field in the Middle East, before the Mullahs and Saddam, and the West’s breakdown in relations with that part of the world. He was on joint digs with the people out there. Then things got so bad that all the projects were dropped and Western money, mainly American, was withdrawn. Of course he’s horrified by what’s happened to archaeology in Iraq. He blames America’s thirst for oil and refuses to live in the USA any more.’

‘Does he think the British are any better?’

‘Not much. But just enough, which is handy for us.’

The press conference was a brilliant PR coup if that was what the town and the museum needed. Any mention of mysterious cults puts the headline writers into overdrive.

‘Was the prince a pagan at heart?’ was the mildest of them. The national press picked it up overnight and the next day the phone never stopped ringing. I did my best to answer unsensationally, knowing that anything I said would be souped up in the retelling. By the time we shut up shop I felt as if my brains had been picked over with a set of delicate scalpels and all my ideas and emotions lifted out, except for a dazed weariness that was almost catatonic.

Before locking up I went along to look at the exhibition. Now there was no need for secrecy, the two tiny objects, one round, one square, had been placed beside the buckle. Suddenly it struck me that they looked as if it had given birth to them, as if these were its offspring. I had felt myself being drawn down the corridor to the room by an
invisible thread, and now again I had the same sensation as before of being watched, as if I wasn’t alone. Quickly I switched off the light and left for the comfort of Caesar and a large whisky and dry ginger.

The chairman rang me in the morning. ‘Have you seen the papers? They’ve really put us on the map.’

By lunchtime Phoebe was having to regulate the flow of visitors, all eager to see the latest finds. I hoped they wouldn’t be too disappointed.

‘Some of them were rather weird, Mr Kish,’ she said later as she handed me the key to the king’s exhibition room. ‘New Agers I should think. Like those who turn up at Stonehenge on Midsummer’s day.’

‘With any luck it’ll be a nine days’ wonder,’ I said, ‘and then we can get back to our usual quiet life.’

‘I wouldn’t count on it. Goodnight, Mr Kish. See you in the morning.’

I’d hardly had the time all day to more than skim through the
headlines
so I took the papers home to read at leisure. Caesar didn’t like me reading. He would jump up on the arm of my chair and dab at the pages of book or paper with a closed paw before trying to climb onto them so that I had to stop and give him my attention. This time however I pushed him off. Somehow one of the journalists had got hold of Linden. ‘Specialist in Middle Eastern religions and mystery cults believes he has identified the writing on the folded golden sheet as lines from an Orphic poem. Orphism was a mystery religion popular in Roman Britain, and in competition with Christianity for dominance in the late Roman period. Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Bacchae for refusing to join in their dance in which they were also said to tear wild animals apart in their frenzy.’

No wonder the public had been queuing up to get in.  

I telephoned Hilary. ‘Have you seen the papers?’  

‘I have.’  

‘Did Linden tell you about this?’  

‘He rang me to apologise. He was just about to tell me he thought he had identified the text but the press got to him first. Of course he claims that wasn’t what he said, and I do believe him.’  

‘So do I. But as a result we’ve had the weirdoes on the doorstep all day, clamouring to get in.’

A small queue had already formed when I got to the museum in the morning. I decided to use the back way into the building, only to be met by Lisa waiting outside my door.

‘Could I have the key to the safe, Alex? I presume you thought the new finds would be more secure there overnight. Probably a good idea but we’ll have to let the customers in on the dot. I imagine that’s what they’ve come to see after yesterday’s press so we’d better get them back in the case before we have a riot on our hands.’

‘What do you mean, Lisa?’ But already my heart was beginning to thud with my suspicions. ‘I left them there in the case with the buckle last night. Then I locked up and went home. Are you saying they’re not there now? Come on.’

I hurried along the corridor towards the king’s room, Lisa almost running to keep up with me. The door was open. ‘Who unlocked the door?’

‘I did. I wanted to make sure we really had found the best layout for the exhibition.’

Even from the doorway I could see the buckle was now lying on its own. But I crossed the room and peered through the glass in the hope that the two small finds would miraculously reappear. Then I tried the lid of the case and found it was already unlocked.

‘We’ll have to call in the police. Can you put a notice on the glass saying the objects found in the buckle have been removed for further examination?’ It went through my mind that I had been stupid to lift the lid, leaving my fingerprints on it and possibly obscuring others. But it had to be relocked in case anyone took a fancy to the buckle itself. The shock of finding the objects had really gone seemed to have stopped me thinking clearly. Now my brain began to re-engage.

‘Cancel what I asked you to do just now,’ I said to Lisa. ‘I realise we’ll have to close the whole room. The police may even want us to close the museum itself. Until we know put a notice on the door saying closed for relocation.’

‘Someone will find out what’s happened,’ Lisa said. ‘There’s bound to be a leak.’

‘I know but we’ll keep it quiet as long as we can.’

Back in my own room I notified the police, then the chairman who
seemed to take the disappearance as a personal disaster, and finally Hilary.

‘I wonder what it means,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to tell the department. I’m afraid they’ll insist on everything coming back here for safety.’

I’d also been wondering what it all meant. Why those two
miniature
objects and not the gold buckle itself, of far more value just for the weight of the metal?

The rest of the day was spent being interviewed by the police and explaining to angry members of the public that the exhibition had closed early because of problems with the air conditioning, a fiction that couldn’t be argued against.

The next morning a police expert on art and antiques theft turned up and shook his head. The chance of recovery was very remote. The objects had probably already been spirited abroad where there were collectors to pay a lot for anything with a whiff of mystery or cult attached to it. Then in the afternoon, as Hilary had predicted, London demanded the return of all the finds, and the chairman ordered an internal inquiry. My job was on the line.

I was suspended for three months pending the results of the enquiry into whether I was guilty of gross negligence. Fortunately the union found me a good lawyer who hoped to be able to convince any judge that I couldn’t even have suspected, let alone known, that the new finds would be an immediate target. Meanwhile to pass the time I took myself to London with the idea of meeting Hilary for lunch but also to talk to Linden and to study some of the finds from other sites that might throw light on the two objects found in the buckle.

Linden and I had agreed to meet in the British Museum café, high up above the dome of what had once been the Round Reading Room where Marx and so many others had fed their imaginations. I had spent the morning peering into the glass cases that housed the Roman and Anglo-Saxon artefacts and marvelling again at the jewelled and gleaming Sutton Hoo Hoard, to which, the experts said, our own find came a close second. Our collection was now in the strongbox that is the Museum of London and we were unlikely ever to get it back.

‘Tell me about the inscriptions.’ I was watching slightly mesmerised
as Linden went through his coffee ritual of capturing milky foam on his spoon.

‘They’re usually instructions to the dead on what to do when they get to the underworld to make sure they go to the Isles of the Blest rather than to Hades.

‘What sort of instructions?’

‘Well, as usual the left is the sinister side so the soul is told to avoid the spring on that side and drink from the spring on the right. The soul has been purified in life by the right rituals and claims to be no longer mortal but a god.’

‘So they were buried with the dead, these instructions?’

‘Just like your finds. Come on. There’s one here I can show you that you probably missed this morning.’

And I had. After a time of looking at small objects under glass, the eye and brain get weary and begin to miss even the very thing you’re searching for. There it was now in front of my eyes when Linden had led me to the right room, and the right case in that room, or rather there they were: a slightly concertinaed thin gold plate with writing on it and the narrow pendant it had been folded up in.

‘There are several of these from Southern Italy, mostly in the museum at Naples but just this one here. As far as I know none have ever been found in this country.’

‘And now the only one that has is lost.’

‘I’ve been keeping my eye on the internet sites but nothing has turned up yet. Usually there’s a buzz when the traffickers get their hands on something interesting but nothing so far.’

‘Why don’t the police monitor this sort of thing?’

‘Oh they do. But the thieves are very clever. They use codes and sites that change all the time. It’s the modern version of the
Willow-the-Wisp
. As soon as you think you’ve caught it you find your hands are full of air or smoke. I’ve got something else to show you here. It’s on loan from St Albans right now, which is lucky for us.’

Again he led me between the dizzying glass cases with their
precious
jewelled holdings like iridescent flies entombed in amber, until we reached a special exhibition of religious symbols lent by other museums around Britain. At once I saw the small round medallion, so
similar to the one from the prince’s grave, that had been in the buckle with the gold leaves. ‘This one has the Egyptian sun god Ra in the middle instead of your Christian Chi-Rho,’ Linden said, ‘but the
principle’s
the same. Hedging your bets that one of them will get you into the happy hunting grounds.’

A photograph showed the back of the amulet. ‘That’s different too,’ I said.

‘It’s Mithras, not the same as your Orpheus, I agree, and instead of his usual birth from the cosmic egg he’s coming out of the cave where he’s just slain the bull or, as some authorities think, been born out of the primal rock instead of the egg.’

‘This is fourth-century Roman.’

‘So, I suspect, is yours. An earlier coin that’s been reworked as a sort of lucky charm. The Christian symbol in the middle probably dates from later than the other motives.’

‘If Saebert’s sons were still pagan they might have wanted their dad to be sure of a happy afterlife. But wouldn’t they have been the sort of pagans Bede describes, believing in life as just an interlude in the darkness?’

‘As I said: no harm in hedging your bets with a good luck charm. Or maybe Saebert’s own faith was a bit shaky still. The ancient world was prepared to see the numinous under all sorts of names and disguises. It’s only the monotheisms, Christianity, Islam and their forerunner Judaism that said you had to restrict yourself to one story.’

‘So what we’ve got is an Anglo-Saxon prince, an early Christian buried with a lot of symbols of foreign gods, Mithras, and the other one I can’t pronounce…’

‘Ormuz.’

‘Ormuz and Orpheus, only he wasn’t a god but some sort of pagan prophet. But what does it all mean?’

‘Does it have to mean anything? Can’t it just be a bit of fascinating Dark Age history?’

‘It could have been,’ I said, ‘if the things hadn’t been stolen. Somehow that makes it all different. Sometimes I feel as if a ghost walks over my grave.’

‘I’ve felt that too, in old sites in Mesopotamia and Persia, as it used
to be called, when we’ve suddenly come upon something that hasn’t been seen for three thousand years or so, as if the people who were there are still keeping watch.’

‘That’s it. That’s it exactly.’

‘I think a lot of people have felt that sensation, that’s why you get stories like the curse of Tutankhaman. Anyway I’ll keep looking to see if anything turns up on the internet.’

Linden, I could see, wasn’t going to tell me his precise sources and I could understand that. It gave him a stake in our discovery. I sensed he was lonely and that every new contact was important to him, even if he had to buy his way in with his exclusive information. And it was one thing less for me to keep tabs on. I could afford to be grateful. Preparing my defence was taking up more time than I could have imagined possible a couple of months ago. I saw myself, with Linden’s help, recovering the finds in a blaze of glory, the chairman shaking my hand and offering me a pay rise and full reinstatement which I would decline because of a better offer from a more prestigious museum. Then reality stepped in and I saw myself dismissed and retraining as a teacher just to keep Caesar and me fed and a roof over our heads. I could teach history or art history, I thought gloomily after Linden had left, and while I waited for Hilary to join me for lunch.